Hack and Hunt! Tales from our Way Day Easter Egg Hackathon

Something we often emphasize on our teams here at Wayfair is that ideas could and should come from everywhere. It is important that every individual, not just our business owners, product managers, and designers, are thinking about our work in the context of the overall the customer experience.

When it comes to fresh and exciting feature additions, our involvement in the ideation process invites us to step out of our functional roles and stay engaged with, or even take the driver’s seat in, the ideation phase of feature development. As a workplace rooted in collaboration and psychological safety, Wayfair does two engineering-wide hackathons a year, and some of our most cutting-edge features and technologies have sprung from the results of these events.

One of our Storefront teams took some time this month to do an off-cycle hackathon to build Easter Egg features for Way Day, a new promotional holiday at the end of April. This holiday is a celebration of our brand, and the goal was to surprise and delight customers visiting our site for the first time. Unlike our engineering-wide hackathons, which are generally very open-ended, teams were tasked with a more targeted purpose: Add playfulness to the Wayfair homepage through the medium of surprise interactions. Participants were required to have their ideas vetted by our design team to be sure these new features didn’t interfere with the more strategic plans for the day.

And here’s what our developers tucked away on wayfair.com and wayfair.ca to give them the Way Day treatment! (Warning: spoilers below!)

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The Konami Surprise

This is a classic in the Easter Egg genre. Thanks to a joint effort between our Homepage and Media engineers, entering in this iconic code will display a hidden message on the Wayfair homepage!

Delightfully Hidden Balloons

There’s something hidden in the sprays of balloons near the bottom of the page. One of our Storefront Homepage developers built the following cute interaction to reward folks who made it all the way to the footer.

Everything Gnome

With a zillion products in our catalog, it could be impossible to keep track of the variety of things we sell. Our Storefront Navigation team is tasked with helping customers discover the breadth of our catalog, and in service to this goal, created a new interaction in the site footer to expose some of our quirkier items: Our wide selection of garden gnomes! Be sure to mow the entirety of the footer “lawn” in order to see a carefully curated collection of gnomes.

Scroll Down!

There’s a lot to explore on site for Way Day, and one of our Storefront Homepage developers wanted to make sure you didn’t miss a thing. If you’ve been idling on the page for too long without scrolling, we’ve added a toast reminder to get you moving and checking out the great deals below.

Experience Falling Deals

Most of our customers shopping on Way Day will be hunting for a deal. But if you hunt a little harder in the splash of balloons in the hero slider, you might find a clickable, pulsing object that triggers a surprise! Once triggered, it will track any user interaction with animated value propositions. Get clicking!

The WayDashboard

Hackathon projects generally fall into one of two categories: A time to try something unexpected and new, and a time to “scratch an itch” – to build or fix something that will make your life easier going forward. Our Web Analytics team got into the spirit of the day by taking the latter approach, with one of our web analysts building out a dashboard to track real-time customer metrics for Way Day. Having the ability to monitor real-time trends and benchmark to other major promotional days will give us insight into Way Day performance and allow us to make quick pivots in strategy if needed.

Did you manage to find all the Way Day Easter Eggs? Was it as much fun clicking and exploring as it was for us to come up with charming, animated companions to guide you on your hunt for a deal? Our Inspire Superpod, tasked with creating experiences that highlight the lanes available for discovery and inspiration, were able to get into the Way Day spirit by showering themselves in balloons to keep motivation levels at maximum. We’re chuffed with how our features turned out.

In the aftermath of your shopping fun, you might be inspired to get in on the action when it comes to technology at Wayfair – especially on our Storefront team! If you’re passionate about people and code, we want to hear from you. Apply to join our team today.

Responses

hi guys, does Wayfair have a set of apis for product catalog, placing orders using guest checkout. We are creating an ad tech platform that allows shoppers to make a one click purchase without having to enter payment instruments, billing address, contact information. Would love to enable shoppers with this ability.

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